The Mysterious Mr. Love

Want to find out what mysteries lie buried in our psyches? Fall in love and get married; you'll find out quickly. That cynical quip aside, intimacy reveals fascinating things about ourselves and others.

Take Adelaide Pinchin (Rachel Fowler), for example, who lives with her parents and makes hats for a living, in suburban England, circa 1910. She sublimates her plight as an unmarried woman whose biological clock is winding down by reading dime store romance novels and day dreaming about a dashing paramour, for truly, any entanglement would seem illicit in Adelaide's parents eyes, at least according to Adelaide's mind.

When serial romantic fraud George Love (Leigh Miller) identifies Adelaide as his next victim of seduction and financial theft, the battle begins. At first, Adelaide looks like an easy mark for Love. Fowler's questioning eyes, quivering lips, and nervous hands reveal a maid in love with an ideal, not its physical expression. Miller has already let us in on Love's modus operandi and the suave, self-assured, criminal mind that disparages women and preys upon the most vulnerable of them to make his living.

Leigh Miller as George LovePhoto: Brian Landis Folkins

All goes according to Love's plan, until Adelaide reveals herself to be more than she seems; then the tables turn, or do they? At that point, playwright Karoline Leach's mystery plumbs unexpected psychological depths, with Fowler and Miller delighting us with new emotional wrinkles. Part of the charm of the story is that it takes place at a time when psychology was a relatively new social science and that the nascent clarity of the period is reflected in a number of dynamics which might have come out of psychoanalyst's notebook from that era. Jeff Roark's direction of this delicate chess game is both elegant and energetic.

The Grant-Humphries MansionPhoto: Dian McGown

The period costumes and simple set pieces not only synch up nicely, but fit right in on the original stage in the basement of the Grant-Humphreys mansion, a well-tended site of the Colorado Historical Society.

The Mysterious Mr. Love runs March 13th, 14th, 15th, 20th, 21st, and 22nd at 8pm at the Grant-Humphreys Mansion, 770 Pennsylvania St., Denver. The building opens at 7 pm. $20 suggested donation. Check out the home of Colorado's third governor, James Benton Grant, and the A. E. Humphreys family that further developed it.